It’s not even February, and 2013 has already exhausted me to the quick. As someone who doesn’t particularly put much stock in new year’s resolutions, I seem to have started the year with perhaps too many endeavors. Did I really have to sign up for the New York half marathon this year? Do I really need to take a course on microeconomics on Coursera?

To top it all off, I have been traveling to and from Rhode Island for work on an almost bi-weekly basis. Coincidentally, my Rhode Island destination is a town over from N.’s hometown. Between Christmas and work, I’ve been getting a crash course on life in the Ocean State.

Don’t worry, though; this blog isn’t suddenly going to pick up and move north any time soon. But, if it were, there are certainly some consolations to be had, such as The Chocolate Delicacy, a husband and wife-owned chocolate shop that has been doing business for over twenty years in picturesque, quaint downtown East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

On my last trip, I stopped in and happened across something wonderfully novel and completely addictive: dark chocolate covered animal crackers.

Apologies for last week. It’s all the Christians’ fault. They took me, a lonesome Jewish girl, into their home on Christmas and gave me gifts and fed me ‘til I was stuffed fat as a holiday goose. Between the eating and the sleeping and the chatting and the eating and the napping I completely lost track of time. An old house in suburban Rhode Island, where I was staying with N.’s family, is essentially a vortex where time stands still and a person can forget the day of the week. And so, I neglected to post.

But in case you didn’t get the picture, one thing I did plenty of over Christmas was chow down. Most of what I ate was traditional homemade fare – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, spanakopita (Greek Christmas!), trifle, cheesecake – but N. did take me to a local Rhode Island ice cream joint, Newport Creamery, to enjoy a famed frozen treat with a provocative, intimidating name: the Awful Awful.